Posts by Doctor Syntax

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

Re: Thanks but no thanks

That's not an EU standard for anything. It's an Adobe Howto for one of their products.

Re: collapse of global liberalism’s intellectual paradigm

We are already out of the jurisdiction of the ECJ. AFAICS both Labour and Conservatives seem to be thinking of getting rid of the ECHR. Both seem unhappy with the courts keeping them in check. The one came up with the nutty idea of of there being a safe way to intercept E2E encryption and the other tried to use the resulting legislation, onlly to be thwarted by their attempt blowing up in their face. Both seem to be enamoured of the idea of deeding everything and anything to the AI kleptocracy....

And that's before we look at Reform.

Re: But we reserve the right...

"They're saying no students that hate the US, are criminals or are anti-democracy."

The US has a convicted felon as combined head of government and state and is doing all he can to put himself above the (democratic) law. I don't think any students would be in the same league.

Nobody gets out of here alive.

Re: Thanks but no thanks

"there will be enough expelled tradesmen to weld the whole thing shut"

There'll be tariffs to pay on the steel.

Re: collapse of global liberalism’s intellectual paradigm

"EU and UK are not removing those freedoms."

Just make that the EU. The whole idea of Brexit was to let government escape adult supervision.

Now we're out in the cold economically with a massively shrunken home market Starmer has no choice but to suck up to the US and hope there are no changes of mind.

Re: "Mute Questions?"

Probably mute as nobody would hear them.

Re: Yeah, nah bro

"banning bad foods"

Chlorine-washed chicken and steroid-enhanced meat come under that heading so why are they on sale in the US?

"stopping criminals entering"

Unfortunately HMG have decided a convicted felon should be invited to the UK.

Re: Don't be silly

Being selective is exactly what they say they'll be and is the issue. Diplomatic status may or may not be excluded but a lot of international relations are conducted through visits which will not be on diplomatic passports. That will be disrupted and the disruption will escalate.

So the US is going to find itself with a diplomatic crisis to go with its constitutional one.

Mysterious leaker GangExposed outs Conti kingpins in massive ransomware data dump

"The data we've reviewed provides strong indicators that the source behind the leak is either an ex-member or a disgruntled insider from within the group"

This could get interesting. Those named, and others not yet named, looking round, wondering who it could be, settling on likely suspects and taking action. In the case of those not yet named, taking preventative action.

American science put on starvation diet

Re: Open invite

An effective welcome will mean either an increase of the county's scientific budget or a displacement of the country's existing scientists. In the case of the UK I can guess which it would be.

"a constrained fiscal environment"

And we wonder what recent events might have caused that.

Aussie businesses now have to fess up when they pay off ransomware crims

Make the fine equal to the ransom paid. I doubt it would be legal to insure against fines.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Re: Theoretical Liability vs True Liability

"bank manager wrote them them a check on the spot."

In the circumstances I think I'd have required cash.

ConnectWise customers get mysterious warning about 'sophisticated' nation-state hack

Re: Ironic

Ironic but not surprising. Baskets full of eggs are worth more than individual eggs. If you're going into the basket-weaving industry you need to be really good at it and stay that way.

Why is China deep in US networks? 'They're preparing for war,' HR McMaster tells lawmakers

Re: Cheques and Bank Balances

They actually call them checks over there.

Re: "They're Preparing For War" - Complete Rubbish

I'm not sure the presence complained about was the hardware, it was the remote access gained. As I remember the reports it was gained through Cisco kit, not Huawei.

"Those checks and balances are in place for good reasons"

Checks and balances are out of favour with the current USG.

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

Re: Don't like it at all

For the people who actively like Outlook and Gmail there's already Outlook and Gmail. They're catered for.

A lot of other people actively dislike how Outlook and Gmail work. Shouldn't the purpose of other clients be to put them first?

As to the release cadence, I find just a few things break over a couple of years. They're easier to deal with than having stuff broken every 6 months.

Re: "reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies"

On reflection I wonder how feasible it would be to take a top-posted email, work out the posting order, and present it to the user as if it had been bottom posted.

Re: "reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies"

the flow

breaks up

Top-posting

Re: Compared to Evolution?

"as I understand it TB moves (not copies) everything into its own mailbox repository"

Unless it's changed recently the choice of leave on or remove from server is a tickable box. Look under server settings.

Re: For a GUI mail client it's OK

A cosmetic bug that escapes and affects many (?most) users may not be a bad bug but it does reveal a worse one: lack of pre-release testing.

Re: Don't like it at all

Take a look at Seamonkey, if only for the email part. It's basically a slower-moving T'bird under the covers but still mostly sane interface-wise although wrapping the calendar into it instead of having a separate window has buggered it up a bit, nothing like the main T'bird release, through.

Feds arrest DoD techie, claim he dumped top secret files in park for foreign spies to find

But he knew he was smarter than the others.

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

Re: "the new Command would protect all military networks from attacks"

"Depending on what the British government retirement pla is, even with lower pay this might be worth jumping on."

Unless it's radically changed since my day it won't be worth it.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

"is black a colour at all?"

In holiday jobs in the textile industry I discovered there were many shades of black yarn. When the dyes of black fibres are examined by thin layer chromatography it turns out that there are often multiple colours in there.

Dell has $14BN AI server backlog, warns projects are 'nonlinear'

Re: After the gold rush ended...

They retired with all the prospectors' money.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

Fortunately I don't bank with Barlclays. Unfortunately it's likely to just be the start of a new lap in the banks' race to the bottom and all the others will follow.

Nvidia is cozying up to China with Shanghai R&D lab plans, Senators cry

Erect artificial trade barriers and be amazed at the consequences.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

Re: Physical violence?

"give you a reprogramming you will never forget"

Surely attacking its storage banks with an axe would be a reprogramming it'd never remember.

Victoria's Secret website laid bare for three days after 'security incident'

Re: Where are all the acronyms?

Titillation Industry Titan Swoons Under Pressure

A two in one comment.

India none-too-subtly reminds Big Tech that local laws prohibit dark patterns

Re: Good Luck To Them

Nothing would say serious talk like a few successful prosecutions.

Sardina throws bait toward SUSE Enterprise Storage users

Bingo!

"SUSE Storage as the current storage offering from SUSE, based on the Longhorn project, represents a forward-looking, container-native evolution. It supersedes the end-of-life SUSE Enterprise Storage, which was a more traditional, broader software-defined storage solution. SUSE has been working with all of its customers on the optimal solution for their current and future software-defined storage requirements."

Trump trade policy to cost Nvidia $10.5B in lost H20 GPU revenues

I expect they're flogging all they can make anyway but maybe it trims the price they can charge.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

Re: Its a bit of a mess, bit was avoidable

"You don't have to be a Nobel laureate in Economics to know that trade policy can't be turned on and off like a light switch."

OTOH, you'd like to think a POTUS would know that or at least have advisors who'd know that and listen to them.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

"Isn't sodium ...really reactive. With ... water? But is this the best domain for their deployment?"

Ships?

Attack on LexisNexis Risk Solutions exposes data on 300k +

A management that didn't solve its own risks.

Russian IT pro sentenced to 14 years forced labor for sharing medical data with Ukraine

I suppose his labour will be carried out with Fnacy Bear or the like.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

"The former light-industrial (garment-making) site at the bottom of our road has long gone and been redeveloped as housing"

Ah, yes. The double whammy. Now we not only have the occupants of the housing of the walk to work era needing to commute, we also have all those living in the new housing that replaced the work places. Ideally those old workplaces should have been repurposed as new-style workspaces, encourage their use as offices instead of city centres by favourable taxation policies.

Why didn't this happen? Ever since WWII having housing and workplaces next to each other was frowned upon, partly because slum housing was found in such locations (spot the syllogism) and partly because the old industrial sites were often heavily polluting by having coal-fired boilers. Yes, this mess has been carefully planned.

Re: Cuckoo land

"depending whether some tosser had been watching a movie on the M6 instead of... y'know... driving."

My experience of the M6 in the West Midlands and the adjacent bit of the M5 Is that one could easily and safely watch a movie from the drivers seat if one wished - in fact several. Being called upon to drive would be at best intermittent.

Re: Conflicting thingies

"Water cooler chat should not be underestimated. "

I never worked in a place which had, at least to my knowledge, a water cooler. I suppose we just managed without.

"if you want to equip a workspace in your home that can be a substantial capital investment"

It's not usually going to be a cost on the worker. You said you equipped the newly remote workers with laptops if they didn't already have them and I'd guess non-company laptops would have been unacceptable. True they would require an internet connection but that would almost inevitably exist.

My daughter is on her third job working almost exclusively from home had laptop, extra monitor and printer provided. Maybe the exclusive printer is one thing that the employers wouldn't have had to provide had she been office based - that and the VPN.

Re: For those who can

"The company has a 'green' initiative and has an annual report on how much we are contributing to pollution (this report is increasingly being demanded by our customers) so it is a win for everyone."

I'd be surprised if most of the businesses doing this include commuting.

Re: Cuckoo land

"Don't be ridiculous, you will have to move"

"What's the relocation package like and will you be able to arrange the viass for myself and family?" Press the erk for so many details that they can't escape thinking about the logistics.

Re: Cuckoo land

One-car households should be the norm. Not out of an authoritarian "we'll tax the bejesus out of second cars", but because public transport should be cheaper and of comparable speed for getting a worker, laptop and their lunch to a place of work.

And gravity shouldn't exist because if it didn't air travel would be easier as well.

Public transport can work well for commuting if there is a single route, fairly direct, between your home and place of work - and it's adequately time-tabled. Many decades ago that existed where I live. It took half an hour to go by bus to the nearest town with four buses an hour, one of which served the next most outlying village. In peak times those were doubled up. Even so it only supplied a fraction of the transport needed because most people were able to walk to work as the workplaces were close by; this was the England of industrial villages.

Now the local mills are gone and the villages are dormitory, not industrial. The bus service is down to one an hour, not doubled up but reduced to single deckers out of busy periods. The journey takes 40 minutes because the route is less direct to cover (badly) two former routes. Some people work at home. For the most part the others have a choice of conurbations 20+ miles away.

Before I retired my last client site on the outskirts of one of those conurbations was c25 miles away. I could drive in 40-45 minutes. Public transport on a roundabout* route would have required about 2½ hours overall including a wait for about half an hour for one change of bus and a very tight 4 minutes for another, always assuming the bus could keep to its timetable on a crowded motorway.

A household with at least two working members is very likely to need at least two cars because those members are likely to be working in quite different places.

* Roundabout because of the hub and spoke nature of public transport. Nobody is going to provide buses for the sheer diversity of routes achievable by car.

Re: Cuckoo land

"Parking is expensive to make sure only the well-off can afford to drive into the town."

Parking is expensive because parking spaces in London are a very scarce resource. As a scarce but desirable resource it becomes expensive. That only the well-off can afford it is a consequence. Get your causality sorted.

Many years ago when I commuted into London by rail there was a train strike and free parking was provided in Regents Park (not a suitable long-term measure). I'd never seen such free-moving traffic down Marylebone Rd. I almost overshot the turn-off.

Poll of 1,000 senior techies: Euro execs mull use of US clouds

"People are more alert than ever to just how valuable their data is, and it's been astonishing how quickly cloud repatriation and sovereignty have become leading strategic considerations for IT leaders,"

What's really astonishing is how they blindly walked into this situation.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

"And, of course, you need a license for your guest Windows OS. Even if the machine has a Windows license in its firmware, which many UEFI machines will have ... a VM can't see the real machine's real firmware"

AIUI it's possible to create a virtual disk from an existing Windows intallation - not something I've tried. If this is done with a WIndows installation which has already been set up with its licence key can it then be run as an already licenced Windows instance in Virtualbox?